Thanks to reader David Yale of Control Beaters who sent in this note, "DoubleClick finds that 12.6% of its clients' emails bounced in the second quarter of 2002, which is an all-time high." There are a zillion reasons why bounces are getting higher constantly, including people switching email addresses as they change jobs or just change boxes hoping to slow down spam overload. Plus ISPs are increasing their anti-spam vigilence, and bouncing mail that may be perfectly good opt-in, but innocently shares a spam characteristic such as many identical messages being sent to multiple mailboxes in the same system (such as Yahoo) within seconds of each other.

DoubleClick figures the biggest problem is ever-decreasing mailbox sizes. Last year both Hotmail and Yahoo decreased the sizes of their free email account holder mailboxes in an effort to save on server space and to get people to pay for something (in this case a bigger mailbox). Also some corporate IT departments are reducing employee mailbox sizes.

Which adds up to a powerful argument in favor of less-rich email. Logos, pictures, Flash animation, audio, etc., all the fun with tech and design you have with email is becomming verbotten. Yes we can do it, and officially most people can receive it, but unofficially their mailboxes are too full. Bounce!

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